Generally, 3°C can be the difference between snow and sleet; wearing a jacket or not.  In your day-to-day life, it may not seem significant. But 3°C of global warming would be catastrophic.  Heatwaves, droughts, extreme precipitation, even fire:  3°C of warming is really disastrous!  The scary thing is, the world is well on its way there.

Since the industrial revolution, the Earth has warmed been warming continuously. This is a problem that babies you pass in the street will have to live with.  Children born today are up to seven times more likely to face extreme weather than their grandparents if global temperatures do rise by 3°C.  What would their world look like? Rising seawater levels, desertification, frequent floods, and deadly diseases.



Hollywood has always enjoyed imagining the end of the world. While blockbusters like this are clearly fiction.  This film will show the scenario we all face unless more drastic measures are taken to stop burning fossil fuels.

In some parts of the world, world the effects of climate are already visible.  The slums of Bangladesh’s capital are filling up with climate migrants. There, like many other parts of the country rivers, swollen by heavier rain, and melting Himalayan glaciers are washing away people’s homes.  Minara, a woman comes from Bhola District, an area in southern Bangladesh. She tells her story in these words,

“Our home in Bhola had endless amounts of land. There was lots of space for farming, we had a spacious house. There were different types of fruits, vegetation and trees growing at home. We used to eat the fruit from our own trees. I can’t eat them now because they don't exist anymore. Since the river flooded for the third time, I had to flee to Dhaka. Life was much better back home. It was unbearable to live through, truly intolerable. We didn’t have the time to save anything at all.”

1.1°C to 1.3°C of global warming has already transformed Minara’s life. It’s one of the reasons why so many migrants like her are moving to the city each year, nearly 400,000 according to the one estimate. And climate models show there could be much worse to come. Climate scientist, Joeri Rogelj, has spent the last ten years modelling future climate scenarios for the United Nations. He said, “The models we use to carry out this exercise really represent the state of the art of our current knowledge of climate change and where we are heading.” Joeri’s projections use data collected by hundreds of scientists around the world. . Here this is the 3°C level and so it is highly likely that People would hit 3°C by 2100. People would hit 3°C by the end of the century. This is just one of the scenarios Joeri looks at.

The most optimistic assumes that all promises have been kept and net-zero targets are met. Where our best estimate ends up around 2°C at the end of the century, there is still a one-in-20 chance that the world would end up with 3°C instead. 

A rise of 3°C would affect everyone. The effects of climate change will be indiscriminate, even wealthy cities in rich countries wouldn’t be immune to the consequences. European capitals like Paris and Berlin would bake under more extreme heatwaves. Frequent storm surges in New York could turn parts of the city desolate. In many ways, cities magnify, intensify climate events. Cities are hotter than the places around them. They tend to be more vulnerable to flooding. And you can get a really bad event in a city in a way that you can’t in the countryside. And because of their denser populations disasters in a city affect far more people. Some cities might be badly prepared for the changes coming. But they have the means to adapt. Cities tend to be wealthier than surrounding places. They have a lot of amenities.

A city that has taken seriously the risks of a 3°C world wouldn’t necessarily be a worse place to be in a 3°C world, but a city that hasn’t prepared for these sorts of eventualities that might be a really nasty place. So far, many developed cities have gotten off lightly but some rural parts of the world are suffering disproportionately. Particularly, Smallholders—small-scale farmers—are at risk to face severe climate change impacts, over 600 million around the world. They produce around a third of the global food supply. Central America’s “Dry Corridor” supports a mix of smallholdings and medium-sized farms. Sandwiched between the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, the area is prone to droughts. Nearly two-thirds of the smallholders in the Dry Corridor now live in poverty.



Adding to the misery, severe droughts in Central America are now four times more likely than they were last century. Many families from here have gone to the States. The economic despair and debts have pushed many people from this community to do this journey. Migration to the United States from Guatemala has quadrupled since 1990. Not all of this has been due to climate change. But longer droughts would force even more to move. In a 3°C world, annual rainfall in this region could drop by up to 14%. This will give rise to migrations and thus, ethnic clashes across the globe.

At 3°C, over a quarter of the world’s population could endure extreme droughts for at least a month of the year. Northern Africa could see droughts that last for years at a time. However, for some, too much water will be the problem. 10% of the world’s population lives on a coastline that’s less than 10 meters above sea level. For these coastal inhabitants, a 3°C world would spell disaster. By 2100, global sea levels could have climbed by half a metre from 2005 levels. Low-lying cities like Lagos would be especially vulnerable with up to up to a third of the population displaced. And in Fiji, rising waters are already upending lives. Due to this rising sea level and climate change, the village of Togoru in Fiji is being swallowed by the sea.

Rising seas also mean storms cause more floods. And many more countries could suffer. The Philippines and Myanmar are just two countries that will also see an increase in storm surges in a 3°C world. To escape, many will move often, to urban areas. 50pc of the world’s population is currently living in cities, and about a third in slums. For them, a 3°C world could be deadly. Minara has moved to Dhaka to escape the impact of climate change. But life could get even worse for her.

Further, the increasing temperature has become intolerable for many. Days that approach 40°C are now being reported. And high so-called wet-bulb temperatures are on the rise. The temperature of a wet-bulb is a measure of heat and humidity. People make themselves breezy by sweating. But in these conditions, when relative humidity is near 100%, sweat doesn’t evaporate well. So people can’t cool down even if given unlimited shade and water. At a high wet-bulb temperature, the body can’t lose heat and so it gets hotter and hotter and the body is designed to work at a given temperature. And if it gets too hot inside, a person will die. The human limit for wet-bulb temperatures is 35°C around skin temperature. Dhaka will have a much higher chance of reaching dangerous wet-bulb temperatures if global warming reaches 3°C. People can’t really adapt to that. People have to get out.

If the temperature is so high that people can’t work and can’t do hard manual labour outside for significant parts of the year, then many places will become functionally no longer part of the economy. It will spell economic disaster for people already under the poverty line. More of the tropics and the Persian Gulf as well as parts of Mexico and the south-eastern United States could all get to this threshold by the end of the century. Climate modelling might show us the weather, but it doesn’t show us its other effects on society.

Climate change is bound to bring disastrous demographic changes. Established migration patterns could change. Climate disasters may exacerbate reasons people cross borders. Within countries, more people will move to cities. In a 3°C world, tens of millions of people a year could be displaced by disasters made worse by climate change. When people are displaced by climate they may well go to cities because cities are the places that attract people from the countryside. Already a lot of people, who can get to the developed world, not least because the developed world tends to be less hot, will give that a go.

As migration around the world increases, there could be more competition for fewer resources. Water—already a highly contested resource—will be a focal point. Turkey’s new Ilisu dam has reduced the flow of water into Iraq. China lays claim to rivers vital to India and Pakistan. The prospect of a water conflict makes people very uneasy. How national tensions would exacerbate those sorts of reactions in a 3°C world, is the sort of thing that no one should really want to find out.

There are physical things people can do, like seawalls to adapt to changing climate. However, the fact that people can adapt and that adaptation will reduce suffering doesn’t mean that it will eliminate suffering. Suffering is built into this whole process of heating up the planet. Adaptation will only get the world so far.

 “There’s still time to reduce emissions so that a 3°C world remains fiction rather than becoming fact.”

The best way to deal with a 3°C world is not to go to a 3°C world and that’s why increasing efforts on mitigation are important. It’s why working towards negative emissions that could bring down the temperature after it peaks are important. Once you get to a 3°C world, you are in real bad global trouble.

The scale of change needed and the slow progress of governments so far means 3°C of global warming is uncomfortably likely unless more is done. Despite existing pledges, greenhouse-gas emissions are still set to rise by 16% from 2010 levels by 2030. There’s still time to reduce emissions so that a 3°C world remains fiction rather than becoming fact.